Grab bag

[pecunium]

I have new stuff up, in the ever changing Grab bag

If anyone knows of an application to convert jpgs to animation, I've been doing stop motion of blooming orchids (and discovering that Nikon didn't make it easy to make that little trick work. It's built in, but the interface is not as easy as the rest of the menu banks).

Comments

I think you have to make them GIFs first

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

I don't think JPGS can be animated.

I use this, which is clunky, but has two benefits: it is free, and it will run on my ancient and glitchy PII wo crashing. (Did I mention the free?)

Basically, you make a lot of GIFs (I use ancient photoshop), and I put them in their own folder and number them as if they were frames in the order I want them to run in.

Then you drag and drop from the file manager into the unFREEZ window and you tell it how long between frames and if you want it to repeat or not, and then you click the button.

At that point you can preview it in your browser.

If you don't like it, you have to start over, because you can't reorder them once they're in the UnFREEZ window. (at least i haven't been able to make it work.) But for the sorts of small erratic occasional projects I animate (like this one 1984) it's enough, particularly since it's free.

Re: I think you have to make them GIFs first

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

That better be doable as a batch procedure, because I have about 300 for the one, and will have at least 200 of the other.

Even culling out, I can't see less than 150 for either of them.

Sigh.

TK

[geekchick]

I use Macromedia's Fireworks MX for batch-processing and animation. It's got a handy little "Open as animation" option in the File->Open dialog; select a group of images to open, check "open as animation", and it imports them all into a png which you can then export as an animated gif.

I know there's a trial version on Macromedia's site, although I don't remember what sort of restrictions it has on it.

[geekchick]

I know there's a trial version on Macromedia's site, although I don't remember what sort of restrictions it has on it.

Ah, I went and checked:

"Macromedia trial software is time limited, but most trials will function as a full version under normal use. However, RoboHelp and RoboInfo trials have limited functionality."

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Cool, that means I can do it up, and then offer it to the site's mactavish has been recommending.

TK

batch processing to format change is easy

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

I think most of the photoedit programs, not just photoshop, come with a built-in macro, but it's easy enough to set one up with the prefab macro menus.

The one BIG worry about doing batch processing: you have to make sure you set up correctly to go into another folder. Otherwise, it's way too easy to save over your originals after you've, say, shrunk them down to thumbnails, frex.

But for doing animation at the quantities you want to do you're probably better off buying a gif animation program or some kind of slideshow software, if you can afford the $50, from what it sounds like. I know a lot of people use the Ulead software and seem to find it okay, but i haven't used it myself.